Extremely niche, but will be explosive for some meditation geeks:
- for vipassanists, learning how Theravadan meditation worked before the 1800s modernist reforms
- for vajrayanists, learning how similar Theravadan tantra is

@agleighttps://youtu.be/M1KcXP6T6ag
-
Show this thread
-
I wrote about Tantric Theravada and its potential significance for American Buddhism back in 2013, when much less was knowm. Kate Crosby’s field research has filled in many missing details.https://vividness.live/2013/11/28/tantric-theravada-and-modern-vajrayana/ …
1 reply 2 retweets 10 likesShow this thread -
See also Ann Gleig’s 2013 paper on American Tantric-ish Theravada-ish Buddhism, based on her anthropological fieldwork around the Bay Area:http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14639947.2013.832496 …
1 reply 1 retweet 11 likesShow this thread -
Here’s a review of Kate Cosby’s earlier book on Tantric Theravada. (Somehow we all published in 2013!) http://www.globalbuddhism.org/jgb/index.php/jgb/article/view/12/12 …
1 reply 0 retweets 3 likesShow this thread -
For STEM/meditation crossover geeks, a startling observation in Crosby’s talk: Early Tantra drew on formal language theory! Transformational grammar (Panini→Chomsky) was a model for transformation as Tantra’s central principle. [link may be NSFW] https://buddhism-for-vampires.com/metablog/dharmakirti-and-panini …pic.twitter.com/IgVYFvmBHJ
1 reply 3 retweets 23 likesShow this thread -
Replying to @Meaningness
There are several ways to define "modern linguistics" but I would argue that the modern tradition of linguistics is older than Böhtlingk's translation of Panini. It is in fact, older than western work on Sanskrit (be it that of Bopp or Schlegel), or even of William Jones' speech.
1 reply 0 retweets 1 like -
-
Replying to @Meaningness
The first conclusive demonstration of a hitherto unknown parentage between languages is Hungarian Janos Sajnovics' demonstration of the link between Hungarian and Sami (Lapp) in a 1770 book
1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes -
Replying to @TyphonBaalAmmon @Meaningness
This and Samuel Gyarmathi's continuation which developed the theory of the Uralic family happened before the first important works in comparative Indo-European grammar (by Bopp, Rask and others)
1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes -
Replying to @TyphonBaalAmmon @Meaningness
As for Chomsky, I doubt whether he was directly inspired by Pāṇini's grammar (rather than by E. Post, Z. Harris and so on), but at the time he became prominent, linguistics was ripe for increased formalism, and Pāṇini was a well-known classic.
1 reply 0 retweets 1 like
Loading seems to be taking a while.
Twitter may be over capacity or experiencing a momentary hiccup. Try again or visit Twitter Status for more information.